Sunday, November 15, 2015

2002 Toronto Film Festival Report, Part Two

(originally
published in The Outreach Connection
in October 2002)

This is
the second of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2002 Toronto Film Festival.

All or Nothing (Mike Leigh)

Leigh’s
last film Topsy Turvy was an
unexpected departure for the master of low-income British angst, and a complete
success. The new film, back on familiar territory, inevitably looks like
treading water by comparison. It’s loosely structured around three miserable
families in a drab London housing complex – they drink or eat too much, or lose
themselves in sexual role-playing, or in random anger, or superficial good
spirits, or just in all-consuming inertia. Timothy Spall plays a cab driver,
trapped in his own misery, avoiding all responsibility. Sensing himself on the
verge of disappearing completely, he finally breaks out, resulting in a series
of scenes that, if a little over-emphatic, almost rank with Leigh’s best work.
That plot strand arrives at a generally happy ending, but Leigh lets the other
two stories drop completely; in cinema as in life, he seems to be saying,
positive outcomes are largely a matter of chance. Like every Leigh film, All or Nothing is crammed with fine
moments that shine a passing spotlight on a secondary character, anchoring the
film in the world beyond the frame. But it has a more muted tone than most of
his work, making less overt use of comedy, and most viewers will find it less
insinuating than something like Secrets
and Lies.

Too Young to Die (Park Jin-Pyo)

This
Korean film has a simple purpose – to celebrate the love of a man and a woman.
This is out of the ordinary only because the couple are in their 70s, and they
have a lot of sex. It shouldn’t be a surprise that older people can do it
multiple times a week, sometimes a day (the man helpfully marks each session
off on his calendar so we can follow along), but if it wasn’t a surprise the
film presumably wouldn’t exist. It’s somewhere between documentary and fiction
– seeming to have a script, but played by a real life couple who aren’t
professional actors. Objectively, it’s a pretty voyeuristic project (the film
shows the sex in some detail), but it doesn’t feel that way, mainly because the
couple (especially him) are so happy to show themselves off. For the sake of
balance, the picture shows a few rough patches, such as a spat about her
staying out too late with her friends. But if it was ever in doubt that the
movie takes a sentimental view of its subjects, then the incredibly sappy
closing song would wipe it away. Almost incidentally, you notice that their
living conditions are pretty meagre, and there’s the odd reminder of cultural
differences (when he wants to make her a chicken dinner, he buys a live bird
and slaughters it in the yard) but these observations come only intermittently,
amid the calculated universal appeal.

Auto Focus (Paul Schrader)

Schrader
(who made American Gigolo and one of
my all-time guilty pleasures, the remake of Cat
People) ought to be the ideal director to film the story of Bob Crane, the
genial stay of Hogan’s Heroes who
became obsessed with sex and pornography as his career declined. Auto Focus tells the story efficiently
and intriguingly, but it doesn’t particularly look like a Schrader film; it
doesn’t seem interested in plumbing the depths of Crane’s soul, and the echoes
of Bresson that used to mark Schrader’s work are just a memory here. In a way,
Schrader should be praised for his self-effacement. He certainly captures both
the bounce and optimism of Crane’s rise to fame in the 60’s, married to his
college sweetheart with no darker secrets than a few racy magazines hidden in
the garage, and the tackiness of his decline in the 70’s. But this isn’t a
chronicle of the age like Boogie Nights
– it’s a rather hermetic story of one sad figure, and in telling it so
straight, Schrader risks our indifference. Willem Dafoe is rather
one-dimensional as the hedonist who led Crane astray, and Greg Kinnear’s
performance in the lead role sums up the picture – wholly convincing as the nice
guy, but generally just too convivial and straightforward to be particularly
interesting. There are many good moments though – his meltdown on the set of Celebrity Cooks, hosted by Bruno
Gerussi, is especially well caught.

Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce)

Noyce
used to make provocative little Australian films, but in recent years he’s been
the anonymous general behind such epics as Clear
and Present Danger and Silver.
This film marks a home-coming: it’s about three half-Aboriginal girls in 1931,
sent 1,800 miles from their home to a special school for “half-castes.” The
film makes it clear that there were many such “shadow children,” and has a
chilling scene where Kenneth Branagh, as the leader of the cleansing program,
explains the official philosophy on the matter. The children escape and set off
to walk the vast distance home. Most of the film is devoted to their journey
and how they evade the state’s efforts to catch up with them – including a
veteran tracker played by David Gulpilil, who starred thirty years ago in
Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout. The film is
gripping, and evokes suitable anger at what the children endured. But maybe
Noyce has become too efficient a storyteller – you feel very little of the
passage of time, or the incredible distance they covered, or of their hunger or
thirst. This is one of the rare films that’s actually too short – we feel
short-changed on the bigger picture of Australia at the time, the visceral
experience of the journey, and the story’s potentially mythic underpinnings.
The evocation of Walkabout reminds
you how that and other movies found real grandeur in the desert.

Waiting for Happiness (Abderrahmane Sissako)

Mauritanian
director Sissako’s film is suffused in ambivalence about Africa – he celebrates
its beauty and mystery, but constantly returns to images of departure and
escape (or more frequently, failed attempts at departure) and thoughts of a
different life. The film is loosely structured, and the exact meaning of what
we’re watching isn’t always clear – the most recognizable plot strand involves
a young boy serving as apprentice to an aging electrician, accompanying him
from job to job. Initially the film may seem opaque, but you adjust to its
rhythm. It’s crammed with gorgeous images, such as the electrician and the boy
hooking up a light bulb to an outlet and then carrying it into the desert for
what seems like miles. It’s a dream-like Africa, encompassing desert and city
and village and the water’s edge – parameters that hold the characters in place
even as their parched spirits tell them to move on. The old man remembers a
friend who offered him the chance to leave; finally the friend went without
him, never to be seen again. “Maybe that’s what weighs on my heart,” he says:
it’s the skill at depicting this weight through images that makes Waiting for Happiness such an eloquent
work.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).